The United Nations provides water to a community of displaced Sudanese women in South Darfur (Source: United Nations)
State Department Said “Uneven Climate Exposure” Likely to Widen Gap Between Northern and Southern Europe
Climate Change a “Compounding Factor” in Darfur
Pentagon War Game Examined “Environmental Security Challenges” and “Adversary Attempts to Exploit Them"
Washington, D.C., May 27, 2026 - State Department intelligence analysts predicted widening political fissures in Europe and warned about the rise of populist and radical political parties in response to climate action by European governments, according to a Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) assessmemt from 2021. The report is one of four newly released records on the Biden administration’s climate policies that were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and published today by the National Security Archive.
The reports shed light on how the intelligence community, the Pentagon, and other U.S. agencies assessed climate-driven instability across Europe and East Africa while attempting to develop a coordinated “whole-of-government” approach to climate security. The documents also reveal the extent to which the intelligence and defense communities rely on predictive modeling, open-source and third-party climate analysis, and interagency coordination to anticipate and prepare for future risks.
The new revelations come as the Trump administration is pursuing an aggressive campaign to remove government data and documents related to climate change and other important issues from public access.
On January 27, 2021, President Biden issued Executive Order 14008, Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, directing federal agencies to develop strategies to integrate climate considerations into their work. Specifically, Biden called on the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Director of National intelligence (DNI) to firmly embed climate into national security planning by analyzing the security implications of climate change through “modeling, simulation, war-gaming, and other analyses.”
Two months after Biden signed the EO, the DOD conducted Elliptic Thunder, its first-ever climate and environmental security tabletop exercise.[1] In a post-exercise “Quick Look” (Document 1), the DOD’s J8-Studies, Analysis, and Gaming Division said that Elliptic Thunder had used an “East Africa vignette,” reflecting the Pentagon’s emphasis on capacity building in regions most vulnerable to the “cascading” impacts of climate change and state violence.[2] Participating agencies—which included DOD, the State Department, the National Security Council, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Intelligence Council, the CIA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—used a typical Blue Team (U.S. Government perspective), Red Team (adversary), and Green Team (allies, partners, and science) wargame structure centered around three moves: instability due to extreme heat, drought, and the rise of violent extremism; food insecurity and extreme flooding brought on by El Niño; and extreme cyclone activity, cholera outbreaks, and “their impact to strategic international government positions.”
Participants found that, rather than default to a “reactive crisis response,” DOD should proactively engage with climate change as a security threat alongside its partners and allies if it wanted to get “left of the boom.”[3] The report also concluded that the Pentagon should invest in climate mitigation efforts because, according to one study, these investments would “pay great dividends” in the long term. Notably, participants repeatedly stressed the need for integrated coordination across the federal government and with international allies to counter attempts by violent extremist organizations to “exploit crises.”[4]
In the fall of 2021, INR, a member of the U.S. intelligence community tasked with providing all-source intelligence and analysis to diplomatic and foreign policy efforts,[5] published a confidential assessment on the growing threat of “political fissures” in Europe over climate action. (Document 2) The report identified varying regional climatic impacts as among the causes of conflict, namely unequal warming and water security issues between northern and southern Europe: “Southern Europe will suffer from persistent heat waves, drought, and wildfires… [while] northern Europe will see a rise in land prices as arable land elsewhere in Europe becomes scarcer.” This “uneven” exposure, INR stated, “is likely to widen the income gap between the two regions.”
On the energy front, the report anticipated that populist groups, along with countries reliant on fossil fuel imports at the time like Poland and Hungary, would impede the renewable energy transition in Europe. “Radical political parties, rather than denying or obfuscating climate science, are shifting their criticism to the expected costs of the energy transition.” French officials specifically worried that a resurgence of the 2018-2020 “Yellow Vest” protest movement could “derail French President Emmanuel Macron’s reelection bid in spring 2022.”[6]
In the same FOIA response, INR released two additional commentary reports prepared by the Office of the Geographer and Global Issues (INR/GGI) further detailing the Bureau’s climate security considerations.
The first report explicitly underscores that climate change was a “compounding factor” of the violence in Darfur, Sudan. (Document 3) After the Juba Peace Agreement was signed in 2020, violent attacks over land access and land rights continued, with an estimated 250,000 Darfuris being displaced from January to July 2021. An INR map on the first page estimated that, in total, as of July 31, 2021, 930,000 people had been displaced in just North Darfur alone. Although INR cited ethnic and tribal divisions as the main contributor to violence in Darfur, the State Department intelligence bureau stressed that climate change is a compounding factor to intergroup tensions because it has “reduced the availability of arable land while the demand has increased.” Within weeks, the Sudanese government was overthrown in a military coup.[7]
INR analysts relied entirely on open-source analyses from publicly available news articles, academic research, and international institutions like the United Nations and Oxfam in writing the report, as evidenced by the unredacted list of sources and notes on the last page of the document. One cited U.N. report called shifts in land use in Sudan “the first climate change conflict.”[8]
The second INR report is a “compendium” of open-source databases and dashboards “focused on climate change and climate-related issues.” (Document 4) The report provides resources across 11 broad categories, including greenhouse gas emissions, temperature and water, air pollution, agriculture and food, infrastructure, and minerals. In addition to the dozens of non-governmental databases and dashboards, the document also includes federal government resources from NASA, NOAA, the Census Bureau, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), USAID, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Several of these websites and databases, like the USGCRP, NASA’s Emissions and Sea-Level Rise data, and NOAA’s Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, are now defunct or reroute to a new, stripped-down webpage after the second Trump administration’s federal data overhaul, which the National Security Archive has reported on extensively.[9]
The INR reports also offer some hints as to the intelligence community’s priorities around the time that the National Intelligence Council published its first National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on climate change, providing previously unknown and undisclosed context about the Biden administration’s climate security concerns and its coordination with its allies.[10]
This briefing book is part of a National Security Archive effort to illuminate the record on the intelligence and defense approaches to climate change and follows previous electronic briefing books on the IC’s environmental legacy and the ongoing overclassification of a 2008 climate intelligence assessment.
Document 1
Department of Defense Freedom of Information Act Request
In a post-exercise “Quick Look” report, the DOD’s Gaming Division provides an overview of the structure and general purpose of Elliptic Thunder, its first tabletop exercise (TTX) on climate and environmental security. Elliptic Thunder was sponsored by the Office of Stability and Humanitarian Affairs and the Joint Staff J5 to “facilitate a discussion” around DOD’s preparedness in addressing intersectional climate security threats, including food insecurity, migration, water security, and extreme temperatures and weather conditions. Among the initial insights provided by the participants post-exercise were: climate change will exacerbate existing threats; environmental changes will have implications across departments; DOD will need to develop and refine policies across agencies and with international partners and allies to prepare for threats; shifting to a proactive response will better enable DOD to prevent and prepare for climate security challenges; and a “whole-of-government approach” is needed to effectively address ensuing and “cascading” climate threats.
Document 2
State Department Freedom of Information Act Request
This partially redacted INR assessment, classified by Deputy Assistant Secretary Vic Raphael and sent to U.S. officials and members of the Five Eyes Alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom), is one of the first classified documents made publicly available on the Biden administration’s efforts to consider climate change security risks. INR first lays out Europe’s “grand” climate “ambitions” on carbon neutrality and renewables, then outlines climate impact differences across Southern and Northern Europe (a map on page 2 shows a range of exposures in European countries to threats like fire, rain and flooding, sea level rise, and urban heat). Countries in Southern Europe like Croatia, Italy, and Greece are expected to face the most climatic exposure, according to the map. This uneven exposure, INR writes, will lead to growing political fissures between European states, and has already led to a divergence in energy policies across the European Union. The assessment concludes with a section on the “structural impediments” to European environmental goals, including right-wing political parties and competing financial priorities.
On page 3, the Sources and notes page is completely redacted under FOIA exemption b(1) for national security considerations. The National Security Archive has since filed an appeal for the full release of this document.
Document 3
State Department Freedom of Information Act Request
Between the Sudanese military’s failed coup attempt on September 21, 2021, and its successful overthrow of the Sudanese government on October 25, 2021, INR published a commentary on climate change in Sudan as a “compounding factor for Darfur violence.” The report provides an overview of Sudan’s “creeping desertification and drought” in the late 1960s and briefly charts the ensuing decades of ethnic and tribal tensions. INR then provides present-day United Nations and open-source resources that estimate current Darfuri displacement levels, and links resulting resource competition and land clashes to climate change impacts, namely “extremely high seasonal variability and water stress, rising average temperatures, decreasing major crop yields, and worsening food insecurity.” Unlike Document 2, Document 3’s full sources and notes index on page 3 is completely unredacted.
Document 4
State Department Freedom of Information Act Request
This final INR commentary is presented as a “resource for analysts and policymakers who conduct data-driven research or use data to underpin their assumptions.” INR notes that it finds all listed resources to be “reputable,” but it cannot “guarantee their accuracy,” and the databases “do not necessarily reflect the views of INR or the U.S. government.” The National Security Archive has confirmed that many of these databases and resources are still publicly available; however, several of the listed URLs lead viewers to a defunct webpage or reroute to a new agency webpage or homepage.
[1] David Bergun, “DOD Exercise Highlights Need to Address Climate Change, Its Impacts,” DOD News, May 17, 2021.
[2] The following article provides an analysis of how climate change fuels ongoing conflict, food insecurity, and migration in East African countries like Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia: Erik English, “New roots of famine: How climate crises and global conflict combine to threaten millions in the Horn of Africa,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August 18, 2022.
[3] In military operations, risk management, and cybersecurity, the “boom” represents a particular crisis. For climate security, a “boom” can be a natural disaster or extreme weather event, like a category five hurricane, wildfire, or electricity grid failure. Being “left of boom” means being proactive and taking preventative measures before a crisis occurs, while being “right of boom” means being reactive and responding to a crisis after it happens.
[4] In the last decade, research has emerged demonstrating how extremist organizations like the Islamic State waged political and economic power through water weaponization and control of water infrastructure. As a starting place, see Ibrahim Mazlum, “ISIS as an Actor Controlling Water Resources in Syria and Iraq,” Springer, 2017.
[5] Dylan Matthews, “The obscure federal intelligence bureau that got Vietnam, Iraq, and Ukraine right,” Vox, May 28, 2024.
[6] For more information on the connection between the Yellow Vest protest movement and carbon taxes, see Rimel I. Mehleb, Giorgos Kallis, and Christos Zografos, “A discourse analysis of yellow-vest resistance against carbon taxes,” Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, Science Direct, September 27, 2021.
[7] The October 25, 2021, overthrow of the Sudanese government followed a failed coup attempt on September 21, 2021.
[8] “The First Climate Change Conflict,” United Nations World Food Program USA, November 30, 2017.
[9] See the National Security Archive’s Disappearing Data: Trump Administration Removing Climate Information from Government Websites, Disappearing Data Part II: Distorted Science and Deregulation, and the Disappearing Data Chronology.
[10] In April 2021, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told world leaders at a virtual global climate conference that climate change would be “at the center” of U.S. foreign policy, see: Glenn Thrush and Julian E. Barnes, “Biden’s intelligence director tells world leaders climate is now ‘at the center’ of U.S. foreign policy,” The New York Times, April 22, 2021.